Year-Round Sessions Studied : Escondido Is Scrambling to Handle Student Influx

Generally unbridled growth in Escondido has overtaken the capacity of local elementary schools, sending officials scrambling for ways to handle the student overflow without putting them on double sessions.

The two most apparent options are to put at least 24 portable classrooms on district campuses when classes begin next fall, or to order two or more schools on year-round sessions beginning as early as July.

The overcrowding will continue to worsen into the year 2000, the district projects, with the number of incoming students far outstripping the district’s ability to build new schools.

The problem has frustrated parents who have vented their anger both at the Escondido Union School District, for not having better prepared for the overcrowding, and with the Escondido City Council, for permitting the growth to occur in the first place.

The overcrowding is adding momentum to a wave of slow-growth activism in the city, helping to fuel a referendum petition drive now under way. The drive is aimed at forcing a special citywide election to overturn last month’s council decision to rezone a rural neighborhood for a 256-unit apartment complex--a decision that slow-growth advocates say is indicative of the council majority’s support of growth and a mentality that more and bigger is better.

For their part, some members of the Escondido City Council say they can’t be held responsible for the school’s plight while other council members say the city can and should be held accountable. Councilman Jerry Harmon went so far as to suggest that the city should pay to build a new elementary school to help relieve the problem created by the city.

The school board, which already has held public workshops at two of the most affected schools in Escondido, will meet Monday at 5 p.m. to study the matter and then may decide at its regular 7:30 p.m. meeting Monday how best to resolve the overcrowding, at least for next year.

“There are no solutions to this problem that will be palatable to the majority of the people,” said school board President Sid Hollins. “This is one of the most difficult problems this district has faced.”

The overcrowding, Hollins said, was brought on by a combination of factors, including:

- The passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 which eliminated the simple majority approval of school construction bond issues. Now, a much harder-to-obtain two-thirds majority vote is necessary.

- The state has failed to set aside sufficient money to help local school districts pay for new school construction.

- Development impact fees assessed by the Escondido City Council were insufficient to help pay for the schools necessary to house the influx of new students generated by those developments. Local developer impact fees were only a third or a half of those charged by other cities, officials note.

- New state law has now put a capacity on those development impact fees; the new assessments fall far short of meeting the expenses of building new schools.

Said Hollins: “We have a pro-growth City Council and have had for many, many years. Escondido is bursting at the seams with new homes and apartments, and the City Council hasn’t allowed the district, when it had the chance, to increase the development fees the way they should have been to help pay their own way.”

The district owns several sites in Escondido on which to build new schools but has inadequate funds to begin construction. And the district is having trouble setting aside construction funds for schools because it must spend that money on temporary, portable classrooms to handle the immediate problem of overcrowding, district officials note. Already, more than 1,200 students in the district--more than 10% of the district’s student population--are assigned to portable classrooms.

“We’re hoping the Good Fairy will drop $50 million on us,” Hollins said.

Among the options faced by the school board:

- Convert Central and Miller elementary schools, maybe more, to a year-round schedule with students on one of five different “tracks,” or mini-schools. At any given time during the year, four tracks are in session and one track is on a short vacation. All students would be on a three-week vacation in July.

Year-round scheduling provides a more optimum use of school facilities but wreaks havoc on arranging for day care, summer enrichment and recreation programs and family vacation planning--especially among families with children in high schools, which follow the traditional school year and are governed by a different district.

Education experts say year-round schools may be educationally advantageous for some students, but the schedule is difficult on teachers because they are assigned to different classrooms each time they return to campus and because there are more combination, or mixed-grade, classes.

- Bring in still more temporary, relocatable classrooms, which is more economical than year-round school. Critics say that while the portable classrooms themselves are not offensive, they do not resolve the problem of an overcrowded campus and such overtaxed facilities as the library computer labs, cafeteria, bathrooms and playgrounds.

Even though relocatable classrooms can house more students next year, they do not offer a solution for the years to come when, at some point, campuses simply cannot continue to accept additional trailers.

- Double sessions on a traditional nine-month schedule, in which half the students go to school from 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and the other half attend classes from noon to 6 p.m.

There are few supporters of this option, for any number of obvious reasons, including the thought of students being at school after sundown and the possibility that siblings would be on different schedules. Teachers would have to share classrooms and students would receive two 15-minute recesses but no traditional lunch break.

School trustees say it is extremely unlikely that double sessions will be instituted.

- Reshifting existing school boundaries or sending sixth-graders to the middle schools, which currently handle seventh- and eighth-graders. Neither suggestion would solve the problem for more than a few months or a year at best, officials say.

District planners say two new elementary schools are needed right now to handle the number of students assigned to portable classrooms. During the 1987-88 school year--when another 900 students are expected to enter the district--another 1 1/2 schools will be needed, with still another half-school needed in 1988-89 and again in 1989-90 to house still more new students.

But although a new elementary school costs about $6 million, the district anticipates only about $1 million a year in developer impact fees, given the new state formula on fee assessments that took the assessments out of the control of local city councils. The district does not know how much, if any, state financial aid it will receive.

Very simply, the district needs $30 million or more to build the number of new schools it projects will be needed over the next three or four years, while it anticipates less than $5 million in income over that same period.

The district’s economic situation will improve significantly after the year 2000 when Escondido’s redevelopment agency is expected to generate tens of millions of dollars annually for the school district. But school officials say that money is needed now, not then.

A committee of elementary school district trustees, high school district trustees and City Council members has been meeting in recent months to brainstorm the problem, and among the ideas it has considered is joint projects in which the district builds schools on city-owned land after the district’s sites are developed. But because it takes about three years to open a school from the time it is authorized--and because there’s no money now to build any more schools anyway--the district says long-range planning won’t resolve the immediate problem.

School district trustee Barry Baker says he can empathize with parents who are frustrated by the overcrowding. He and his wife have seven children, ranging from two years old to high school age, and next year they will have children in high school, junior high, elementary school and kindergarten.

He said his family prefers the traditional schedule “but year-round schools may emerge as the best solution in difficult times.”

Some people have complained that the school district was too quick in recent years to issue “letters of availability” to developers, assuring them that there was sufficient room to handle new students, when the district had the option of withholding such letters and, by extension, ordering a moratorium on new residential building. New state law no longer allows districts to withhold letters of availability but instead forces districts to handle new students one way or another.

Other critics say the district was not emphatic enough in asking the Escondido City Council for higher developer impact fees to help pay for new schools.

“You are caught in a dilemma of your own making,” Councilman Harmon chided the school board last week.

And he suggested that “maybe it’s time for the city to pay for a new school. I think we have an obligation to this school district to do that.”

But Mayor Jim Rady later scoffed at that suggestion, calling Harmon’s idea “irresponsible.”

Rady said that recent council decisions increasing the density of residential development in the city “are well within the projections the school district has known about for the past 15 years. If they had done their homework, they wouldn’t have this problem.”

Councilwoman Doris Thurston, on the other hand, scolded the council majority of Rady, Ernie Cowan and Doug Best for not being more sensitive to the impact of growth when they approved development.

“We have not had enough data on the accumulative effects of growth from which to make intelligent decisions on growth,” Thurston said. “And it’s not because we couldn’t have had it, but because a majority of the council has not insisted on it. Once we begin considering the accumulative effects of growth when we make decisions, we can start working with the schools and not in opposition to them.”

Monday’s school board meeting will be held at the school district office, 980 N. Ash St.